Tag Archives: dark side of fat loss

You know, that duck in your head that quacks pretty much all day long, telling you how much you suck and just how worthless you are.

We’re all ducked. Some of us have ducks that are louder than others, going out of their way to really duck with us.

The duck is part of the human machinery. You can’t dodge it. You can’t duck it. But you can turn the ducking volume down on it.

I should know. My duck used to quack at full blast. From the moment I woke up until I fell asleep, those negative, self-defeating thoughts raced through my mind. In fact, sleep seemed to be my only reprieve for the quacking. That is, when my duck wasn’t keeping me up all hours of the night.

Another of one of life’s certainties is that there will always be people — sometimes even those who are supposed to support you the most — who will do all they can to keep you down. They go out of their way to sabotage your diet and exercise program. They do all they can to tear you away from your significant other. For some reason, they can’t seem to be happy for you no matter what awesomeness may be occurring in your life.

That’s a hater.

Yet, little do we know that our biggest hater may be, in fact, that three-pound noodle between our ears.

Last night, I decided to pluck one of my favorite books, Life Unlocked: 7 Revolutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear, off the shelf. In it, author Dr. Srini Pillay breaks down the science of fear and why even though we know what we want, we just can’t seem to act on it. We get stuck.

This reminds me of a Facebook status update I posted a couple of months ago, in which I asked my peeps what they would do if they were guaranteed to succeed. The responses were some of the most amazing aspirations I had ever read. Yet, when I later inquired about why they were not pursuing these inspiring endeavors, the almost-unanimous response was fear.

But where does this fear come from?

The human brain is quite the survivalist. Although we have developed higher order functions like speaking, thinking, and, of course, blogging, our brains still possess primitive forces remaining ever-vigilant for signs of danger or threat. It is these latter forces that may lie at the root of what I call the game of start-stop-start-stop-only-to-start-again-and-stop-again when it comes to moving toward our goals.

It’s definitely not as easy as calorie-in/calories-out. That seldom works from anyone in the long term!

Why? Well, because your body is super smart and wants nothing more than to ensure your survival in times of famine (either real or self-induced).

Since it’s the giving season (isn’t it always?), here’s a section on the forgotten fat loss hormone leptin from my ebook The Dark Side of Fat Loss. The only thing you’re missing are the really cool graphics that go with the text.

If you’re not much of a reader, you can watch the video instead.

Enjoy!

Chapter 2: It’s All About the Hormones

The Dark Side knows that dieting makes you fat.

It knows that every time you go on a diet, you end up heavier than you were when you started. This is no coincidence. It’s just basic human physiology with a dash of logic.

Your weight gain is not a simple matter of overindulgence and indolence, but of survival and miscommunication. You are NOT a gluttonous sloth with a predisposition for stuffing your face all hours of the day while planted firmly on your backside. There is a perfectly good answer as to WHY you eat too much and move too little. It’s just that no one bothered to tell you until now.

The answer is not one of psychological defect — you just want to be fat — or thermodynamics, but of hormonal imbalance.

Getting All Hormonal

Hormones are the chemical messengers that tell your cells what do. Since your body is made up of 50-75 trillion of these cells, you certainly want to be sure that they get the right messages and do the right things. Your health depends upon it.

Hormones do it all. They are what make you a man or woman. They put you to bed at night and wake you in the morning. They govern your heart rate and blood pressure. They calm down your anxieties and relieve depression. They help you digest your meals. They control your sex drive. They fight stress and infections. They regulate your blood sugar. And they are also responsible for the burning and storage of fat. Any and all attempts to lose fat without first restoring the proper function of the fat-burning and fat-storing hormones will be in vain. Hunger and hardwiring trump willpower every time.

Many volumes and literally hundreds of thousands of pages have been written on how hormones impact human physiology, function, and fat storage. In fact, the human body contains more than 100 different hormones. This stuff can get pretty darn complicated! So in this chapter, we will cover the basics. If you wish to go deeper down the hormonal rabbit hole, please refer to the recommended materials and scientific references at the end of this chapter to further your understanding.

While we’ll keep it rather simple here, I guarantee these fairly basic concepts will go well above and beyond anything you’ve ever heard or read before regarding how your body burns and stores fat. I even recommend you break out a pencil and paper for note-taking. As you take notes you’ll likely end up with a messy sheet of paper with arrows pointing from each hormone to several others, demonstrating their interdependency. This hormonal interplay exemplifies the extraordinary balancing act your endocrine (hormonal) system must perform in order to keep your body’s fat burning furnace fired up.

The interdependency among hormones is both a gift and a curse. Like dominoes, when one hormone falls out of balance, others soon follow. Imbalances can be a matter of excess or deficiency. In other words, you don’t want too much of a hormone and you don’t want too little.

To illustrate this concept of too much or too little, let’s consider the amount of water you drink. If you drink too little, you become dehydrated and your body begins to shut down. If you drink too much, you can throw off your electrolyte balance – a condition called hyponatremia – and end up in the ER. Neither situation will lead anyone to believe that water is bad for us. The problem resides in its excess or deficiency.

Sheesh, for something that’s marketed to do a body good it sure has quite a few skeletons in its closet.

Before we dive into this controversial topic I should say that I won’t be able to answer your questions as to whether what I am about to write – and what you are about to see in the video below – has anything to do with the raw milk you may consume, since I do not know the source of such milk.

The best thing for you to do is ask your dairy farmer if his/her cows are A1 or A2. There is testing available to determine this.

I first learned of the relevance of A1 and A2 milk during my radio show with Jordan Rubin a few months ago. Listening to him speak about it, I knew that it was certainly a topic of great importance. However, I didn’t quite grasp the magnitude of it until I pulled Keith Woodford’s Devil in the Milk off of my bookshelf this past weekend.

The video below is just the beginning of what Woodford so scientifically outlines in The Devil. It is almost unbelievable how a single alteration in a string of amino acids can quite possibly lie at the root of so many serious health problems including heart disease, type I diabetes, multiple sclerosis, autism, schizophrenia, and more.

As unbelievable as it may seem, Woodford leaves little doubt that A1 milk has a hand in these conditions.

I hope this video doesn’t freak you out too much. I highly encourage you to take action and learn more about this topic. Woodford’s book is a great place to start. I’ll see what I can do about getting him on the radio show.

Please leave your comments and questions below. I will answer as many as I can.